Tag: michael dunn
‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws Encourage Vigilantes

‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws Encourage Vigilantes

It’s been a harsh February, and I’m not talking about the weather. As the annual celebration of the accomplishments of black Americans, replete with references to President Obama, was winding down, the month presented a stark reminder of the casual bigotry that still haunts the lives of black citizens. The verdict in the Florida shooting of Jordan Davis was an unwelcome specter over Black History Month.

While Michael Dunn, who killed Davis in a dispute over loud music, will probably serve decades in prison for the attempted murders of Davis’ friends, he has so far escaped punishment for the death of an unarmed adolescent. The jury deadlocked on a single count of first-degree murder.

A juror told ABC’s Nightline that race never entered the deliberations, but it’s obvious that pernicious stereotypes about young black men hung over the proceedings. And those prejudices allowed Dunn to escape justice for Davis’ death. (Just try to imagine the opposite scenario: A black teenager claims an unarmed white man made him fear for his life, kills him and gets away with it.)

There are no laws or policies that can eradicate stereotypes, no simple cures for implicit bias. But Florida can repeal its awful “stand your ground” law, which has allowed that bigotry free rein. So can the several other states that have passed expanded “self-defense” laws that let trigger-happy gun toters open fire on the unarmed. The streets are made less safe when paranoid gun owners are able to turn a non-violent dispute into a death sentence.

Florida’s “stand your ground” law is merely the worst — the most easily abused — of those laws. Last month, in a Tampa suburb, a retired police captain shot an unarmed man dead in an argument over texting in a movie theater. The retiree claims he felt threatened.

Years ago, Florida’s law, like most, required a person who feared for his life to “retreat” if it were possible to do so. If you could leave, you were not in mortal danger, according to the law.

That changed when a diminutive firearms fanatic named Marion Hammer ascended to the presidency of the National Rifle Association in the mid-1990s. She was a chief architect of “stand your ground” and a forceful lobbyist for its 2005 passage, insisting that law-abiding citizens needed it to protect themselves from thugs.

I interviewed Hammer during her NRA presidency, and her tales were instructive. Though her oft-told lore includes a story about fending off a gang about to attack her in the 1980s, she told me that she had pulled her weapon three times to protect herself from would-be assailants.

That sounded like a person seeking out unsafe settings, looking for danger, wanting to be a vigilante. And that’s exactly the sort of personality who ought to be reined in by the law — not encouraged.

The attention-seeking George Zimmerman, who killed an unarmed Trayvon Martin, is just that kind. He stalked Martin through his gated community even after a police dispatcher advised him to stop following.

It’s not at all clear what motivated Michael Dunn, but he seemed awfully self-satisfied after firing on a carload of young men. After he shot 10 rounds into the SUV, hitting Davis three times, he returned to his hotel room and had pizza.

Dunn’s social views, by the way, are shot through with bigotry, as a letter he wrote from jail revealed:

“This jail is full of blacks and they all act like thugs,” he wrote. “This may sound a bit radical but if more people would arm themselves and kill these … idiots when they’re threatening you, eventually they may take the hint and change their behavior. … The more time I am exposed to these people, the more prejudiced against them I become.”

“Stand your ground” laws simply encourage the Michael Dunns of the world to act on their worst impulses.

(Cynthia Tucker, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, is a visiting professor at the University of Georgia. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.)

AFP Photo

No Ground For ‘Stand Your Ground’

No Ground For ‘Stand Your Ground’

WASHINGTON — The law is supposed to solve problems, not create them. Laws should provide for as much clarity as possible, not expand the realms of ambiguity and subjectivity. Laws ought to bring about the practical results their promoters claim they’ll achieve. And at its best, the law can help us to live together more harmoniously.

By all these measures, “stand your ground” laws are a failure. These statutes make the already difficult task of jurors even harder. They aggravate mistrust across racial lines. They appear to increase rather than decrease crime.

We should not have had to go through another racially charged trial in Florida to learn all this. Writing in The Washington Post, Mark Berman offered a succinct account of the facts of the Michael Dunn case that has aroused so much legitimate passion.

“In November 2012, Michael Dunn shot 17-year-old Jordan Davis in a Jacksonville, Fla., gas station parking lot. Dunn had approached a Dodge Durango holding Davis and three other teenagers and asked them to turn down their music. … An argument developed, and Dunn fired 10 times at the vehicle, including multiple shots fired as it pulled away.

“Davis died almost immediately after he was hit. … Dunn, who was in town for a wedding, returned to his hotel and drove back home to Brevard County the following morning; he was arrested later that day.” Dunn said he saw a shotgun in the Durango but there was no evidence of one.

Dunn was convicted on three counts of attempted second-degree murder but the jury hung on the first-degree murder charge brought in connection with Davis’ death.

The verdict came seven months after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the Sanford, Florida, killing of Trayvon Martin in another case where stand your ground was at issue. Both Martin and Davis were black teenagers. Should it surprise anyone that many African-Americans fear that the law does not protect young males of color when they find themselves in confrontations with whites?

We shouldn’t fault the Dunn jury, which seemed to be struggling to reach a just outcome. Unlike Zimmerman, the 47-year-old Dunn was not acquitted and could spend the rest of his life in prison. The jury clearly saw no justification for his firing at a fleeing car. But stand your ground undoubtedly sowed confusion on the murder count.

Supporters of the law say it was technically not at issue in the case, but this overlooks the obvious role it played in the trial. Cory Strolla, Dunn’s lawyer, mentioned it in his closing argument: “His honor will further tell you,” Strolla said, “that if Michael Dunn was in a public place where he had a legal right to be, he had no duty to retreat and had the right to stand his ground and meet force with force, including deadly force.” The judge, Russell L. Healey, was required to read the relevant stand your ground provisions to the jury.

Florida’s statute allows someone to use force if he or she “reasonably believes that such conduct is necessary to defend himself or herself or another against the other’s imminent use of unlawful force.” The “reasonable belief” standard is not unique to stand your ground laws, but it opens a vast loophole for extreme subjectivity when it is applied in conjunction with them. This has created problems that even the law’s supporters should acknowledge.

A comprehensive 2012 examination of the law by the Tampa Bay Times concluded: “Seven years since it was passed, Florida’s ‘stand your ground’ law is being invoked with unexpected frequency, in ways no one imagined, to free killers and violent attackers whose self-defense claims seem questionable at best.” The law, the Times reporters wrote, has “confused judges” and has “allowed drug dealers to avoid murder charges and gang members to walk free.”

A study by two Texas A&M economists found that such laws “do not deter burglary, robbery or aggravated assault” but do “lead to a statistically significant 8 percent net increase in the number of reported murders and non-negligent manslaughters.”

Stand your ground laws shift the balance of power on the streets to those who carry weapons. They thus provide an incentive for everyone to be armed, which is why the National Rifle Association has pressured legislatures in some two dozen states to enact them. We shouldn’t have to wait for another death and another controversial trial to recognize that this is no reason for laws that cause such palpable harm. It’s time to repeal them.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne

AFP Photo

White Fear Trumps Black Life

White Fear Trumps Black Life

“You can get killed just for living in your American skin.” — Bruce Springsteen

On Aug. 7, 1930, two young black men were lynched in Marion, Indiana.

A photographer named Lawrence Beitler had a studio across the street from the lynching tree. He came out and snapped what became an iconic photo, which he made into a postcard and sold. It shows Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith hanging dead and their executioners, faces clearly visible, milling about as if at a picnic. Though authorities possessed this damning photographic evidence, they never arrested anyone for the crime. It was officially attributed to “persons unknown.”

This was not a unique thing. To the contrary, it happened thousands of times. And African-Americans carry this knowledge deep, carry it in blood and sinew, the understanding that the justice system has betrayed us often, smashed our hopes often, denied the value of our lives, often.

This knowledge lent a certain tension and poignancy to the wait for a verdict in the Jordan Davis trial last week. Davis was the black kid shot dead by a white man, Michael Dunn, at a gas station in Jacksonville, Florida, in November 2012 after an argument over loud music. Dunn’s story was fishy from the beginning.

He claimed Davis pointed a weapon at him. No weapon was ever found. Nor was Dunn ever able to satisfactorily explain why he fired off a second round of shots as the SUV in which Davis was riding tried to retreat. Or why he left the scene and failed to call police. Or why his fiancée, who was inside the convenience store when the shooting started, says he never mentioned Davis’ phantom “gun” to her.

A guilty verdict would seem to have been a foregone conclusion. It wasn’t.

Indeed, the verdict was mystifying. Dunn was found guilty on three counts of attempted murder — meaning the three other young men in the SUV with Davis — but the jury deadlocked on the murder charge. It makes no sense: If Dunn is guilty of the three charges, how can he not be guilty of the fourth?

The jury’s inability to hold him accountable for Davis’ death only validates African-Americans’ grimmest misgivings about the “just us” system. Brittney Cooper, an assistant professor at Rutgers University, put it as follows on Twitter: “This is not just about jail time. This is about whether white fear legally means more than black life.”

It is an observation pregnant with painful truth, truth that was already old in 1930 when Shipp and Smith were butchered.

Dunn decided Davis was — his word — a “thug” and shot him. And we’ve seen this movie so many times before. George Zimmerman decided Trayvon Martin was a thug and stalked him. New York police decided Amadou Diallo was a thug and shot him. And so on.

These decisions are made independent of anything a man actually is — or does. They are made on sight, out of the same impulse that finds African-Americans committing a minority of drug crimes but doing, in some jurisdictions, 90 percent of drug time. They are made, in a word, in fear, the unspoken but clear recognition that black boys and men are our national boogeymen — they threaten by existing — and therefore it is … understandable if occasionally one gets shot by accident.

If Davis had been a white kid in an SUV full of same playing their music too loudly, does anyone really think the confrontation with Dunn would have escalated to the point of gunfire? And if for some reason it had, is anyone so naive as to believe the jury would have failed to convict Dunn of murder?

But Dunn, unlike the killers of Shipp and Smith — and Martin and Diallo — is at least going to jail for something, right? Indeed, at 47, he may spend the rest of his life behind bars. And yes, you could call that progress.

But you could call it some other things, too.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

AFP Photo/Scott Olson

A Few More Thoughts On ‘Thug’

A Few More Thoughts On ‘Thug’

“I hate that thug music.”

This, according to Rhonda Rouer’s testimony last week, is what her fiancé, Michael Dunn, said when they pulled into a Jacksonville, FL gas station next to an SUV full of black kids who had the stereo up high, pumping some obnoxious, bass-heavy rap.

Rouer was inside the convenience store when she heard the shots. Dunn, who is white, had gotten into an argument with the young men about their music, had gone into his glove box for his pistol, and started shooting. As the SUV tried to get away, he fired still more rounds. At least one of those rounds fatally struck 17-year-old Jordan Davis.

Dunn drove to his hotel. He did not call police. He ordered pizza. The next morning, he drove home to Satellite Beach, 175 miles south, where police arrested him. Dunn claimed he shot at the SUV because Davis threatened him with a gun. Davis was unarmed.

Dunn is now on trial for murder. He’s claiming self-defense in the November 2012 shooting, saying he felt threatened, though his victim wielded nothing more dangerous than the aforementioned “thug” music.

And we need to talk about that word a moment. But first, let’s try a thought experiment: Close your eyes and picture a California girl. Close your eyes and picture a chess prodigy.

Chances are, you saw the former as a sun-kissed blonde in a bikini running along a beach in slow motion and the latter as a studious-looking boy in owlish glasses. Chances are you saw both of them as white.

Now, close your eyes and picture a thug.

It is exceedingly likely the person you pictured was black, like Jordan Davis.

The point is, the words we use are often encoded with racial presumptions and expectations. Thus, your image of a California girl is more likely to resemble Farrah Fawcett (born in Corpus Christi) than Tyra Banks (born in Los Angeles) and your idea of a prodigy will not include Phiona Mutesi, a teenage chess champion from Uganda.

And thus “thug” becomes the more politically correct substitute for a certain racial slur. This is why Stanford-educated black football player Richard Sherman was called a thug for speaking loudly in an interview, but singer Justin Bieber was just a “bad boy” while facing charges of vandalism, assault and DUI.

And it is why, in jailhouse letters released to the media, Dunn uses that word to describe the boy he shot. But he doesn’t stop there. “The jail is full of blacks,” he writes, “and they all act like thugs. This may sound a bit radical but if more people would arm themselves and kill these (expletive) idiots, when they’re threatening you, eventually they may take the hint and change their behavior.”

In other letters he decries the lack of sympathy from the “liberal b—–ds” in the media, and takes heart that the counties surrounding Jacksonville are dominated by white Republican gun owners. He writes, “The jail here is almost all black prisoners. You’d think Jacksonville was 90-95 percent black judging by the makeup of the folks in jail here!”

What he describes, of course, is the great Catch-22 of African-American life. They decide you’re a thug from the moment you’re born, so they lock you up in disproportionate numbers. Then they point to the fact that you are locked up in disproportionate numbers to prove that you’re a thug.

Michael Dunn is a hateful man, condemned as a racist by his own words and deeds. But that’s his problem. Ours is that this sickness is not confined to him. And that it causes blindness, rendering sufferers unable to see what is right in front of them.

So one can only wonder with dread how many of us gaze upon this man who shot up an SUV full of unarmed kids, then fled the scene, and see a victim.

And how many will see a “thug” in a teenager just trying to dodge the bullets.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

Photo: Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office